Philly's a tough town for innovators

WHENEVER YOU find yourself searching for somebody to blame, a good piece of advice is to take a long, hard look in the mirror and hope somebody is standing behind you. If not, look somewhere else. At some point, you will realize that it is probably your parents' fault, and you can get on with your life.

Take, for instance, the current state of our sports teams here in the city of Philadelphia. I don't want to say it's the worst it's ever been, but pretty soon Cleveland will be walking around with its chest puffed out. The Phillies are at least 3 years away from being something other than a travesty; the Sixers are still climbing out of the wreckage of the last regime; and the Flyers are coming off a season in which they suffered 11 shootout losses, one of them to "Frozen on Ice."

It's like old times again here in the City of Why Do We Bother, and there is no shortage of culprits to blame. Some days it feels like we're living through an inverted version of Moneyball: play the audio book backwards and you can hear Ruben Amaro Jr., Paul Holmgren and Ed Stefanski talking about their decisions.

Yet for all of the losing, the last few years have also ushered in an era of unprecedented change. The Eagles turned over the controls of their operation to one of the most innovative minds in recent football history. The Sixers brought in one of the most progressive basketball minds in the NBA to oversee their rebuild. The Flyers hired a coach who never played for them (hey, it's a start).

You would think that a city that has seen one professional championship in the last 31 years would embrace anybody who threatens to destroy the status quo. But when I turn on the radio, I hear people complaining about Chip Kelly trading Nick Foles and LeSean McCoy; and when I open the newspaper, I read people complaining about Sam Hinkie declining to compete for the right to lose in the first round of the playoffs; and when I log on to Twitter, I see people complaining about Ron Hextall hiring a guy who has never coached in the NHL.

So yesterday I started thinking, and, by the time I was done, I had settled on a theory: Maybe the people who complain about Hinkie and Kelly and Dave Hakstol are all the same people, and, if they are, maybe they are indicative of some sort of reactionary ethos that lies deep in the identity of this town, one that opposes anything that is not done the way it is "supposed" to be done, the way it has always been done, the way our fathers and their fathers watched it be done, back when programs cost a nickel, and Concrete Charlie wreaked havoc all over Franklin Field.

And, if they are, maybe the volume and violence of their reaction to the recent upheaval is indicative of the influence that the protectors of the ethos once held, because theirs is the reaction of a power structure that is no longer. And if all of this is true - if the hate of Hinkie and the doubt of Kelly originate with an ideology so strong it once served as a fundamental aspect of selfhood in the city of Philadelphia - then maybe it long served to influence the decision-making of the city's sports teams, pushing local ownership groups toward the familiar, the comfortable, the traditional in their hiring, prioritizing guys who said "wooder" and "sawff pressle" over guys with newfangled ideas who didn't really care what the locals thought.

That is to say, maybe the whole trope of the long-suffering Philadelphia sports fan was never anything more than a cycle of self-inflicted misery, passed down from generation to generation, rooted in the threat posed by anybody who suggested a different way of doing things, because doing things different suggested the old way was wrong, along with the people who did them that way, and, yo bro, you tryna to say you're smarter than us?

Maybe it's no surprise that the city's most successful owner over the last decade-and-a-half is the out-of-towner. Maybe it's why many of us think the next decade-and-a-half could belong to his new counterpart with the Sixers.

Or maybe not.

The great thing about blaming your parents is that if everybody does it, then nobody is to blame.

Except, of course, Donovan McNabb.

Blog: ph.ly/HighCheese